Category: Books

I recently received an advance copy of a book called Saints Behvaing Badly by Thomas Craughwell and I’ll offer my thoughts on it soon, after I’ve had a chance to go through it.

The book looks at the human side of saints–the side that is often diminished or dimmed in pious saint stories.

The fact is that the saints were often human, all too human as the phrase goes, and while some might consider it impious to point this out (and while it would be impious to dwell on it obsessively), it also can be inspirational to realize that the saints were indeed imperfect but nevertheless were able to overcome and display heroic virtue.

In that sense, looking at the imperfections of the saints can play a useful and encouraging role for those of us whose salvation is not yet won.

In the meantime,

CHECK OUT THE BOOK.

I decided to take a little road trip over the Memorial Day weekend, so I loaded up the truck and I went over to Phoenix. While there I went square dancing with the Bucks & Bows club of Scottsdale, which was very enjoyable, and I also got in a good bit of listening to audio books while shooting through the desert.

One of the books I listened to was Lawrence M. Krauss’s The Physics of Star Trek. It was a nice read.

It came out a good while ago, so it didn’t go all the way up to the end of recent Star Trek history, but it was nice to hear a professional physicist’s take on the show.

It was clear that Krauss enjoys Star Trek and can appreciate episodes even when they contain physics mistakes. He also handled the subjects he considered in a quite balanced way, regularly avoiding the trap of saying "This could never happen" while making it clear that the current understanding of physics would make it very, very hard for it to happen.

One of the things that Krauss was most impressed with was how good the technobabble on the show can be. While a bunch of it is just junk (from a physics point of view as well as a dramatic point of view), there are a startling number of times where the writers of Star Trek seem to have picked terminology for things that eerily mirrors the actual terms scientists use, started using after the show, or might plausibly use in the future. (An easy example is a TOS episode in which the writers referred to something that sounds like a black hole–before the term "black hole" had been coined–as a "black star.")

After discussing warp drive and time travel and deflector shields and inertial dampers and the like, Krauss concludes the book with a couple of chapters dealing with particularly good and particularly bad physics moments on Star Trek.

I was kind of surprised that in the bad physics moments that he picked on a few things that dealt with minor matters of terminology that I wouldn’t have included in a top 10 mistakes chapter. I was also kind of surprised that he omitted some of my favorite science errors on Star Trek (like where the heck is Spock getting all of his body mass from as he’s rapidly re-growing to adulthood on the Genesis Planet in Star Trek III? I mean, he should be stuffing his face with food every second, if it were even possible for him to metabolize it into body mass that fast.)

But then that’s the fun of top 10 lists: Debating whether they actually are the top 10 or not.

Krauss also handles the subject of religion quite well. He’s respectful to religious sensibilities and interested in the theological questions that are raised by Star Trek technology, such as the implications for the transporter on the question of whether the soul exists.

In his discussion of this topic, though, I think he makes a mistake in reasoning, though it is a forgiveable one since it would require significant theological background to spot the problem and, after all, "He’s a physicist, not a theologian, dammit!" (Please excuse the bad word in deference to Dr. McCoy.)

Here’s the issue: If a transporter takes you apart molecule by molecule (or particle by particle), it would seem to kill you. If it then assembles an identical copy of your body (either out of the same atoms or new ones) and that new copy works properly then–one might suppose–it looks like we are nothing more than molecules in a particular, replicable pattern. In other words: There is no soul.

Krauss remains neutral in the book on whether souls exist, but I would take issue with whether the above line of reasoning works.

From a Catholic perspective, everything that is alive has a soul. Not everything has an immortal soul (only rational beings have those as far as we know), but life and the possession of a soul are concomittant.

So if a transporter makes an identical copy of your body and it’s alive then it has some kind of soul. If it’s clearly rational then it also clearly has a rational and thus an immortal soul. (But be careful here: The reverse is not necessarily true. If it isn’t clearly rational then that doesn’t mean it automatically lacks an immortal soul. Irrational people still have immortal souls by virtue of their membership in a rational species–mankind–even if their exercise of reason is impaired.)

If a transporter made a down-to-the-particle copy of you and it was not rational then I would say that this constitutes evidence that the soul does exist since clearly something other than a molecular copy of your body is needed for you to be rational.

But if it makes a copy and the copy is rational then I don’t think we have evidence one way or the other about the existence of the soul.

Why is that?

Because the evidence is consistent with either the hypothesis that we are nothing more than patterned molecules or the hypothesis that the copy has a new soul (yours presumably having departed when you were taken apart and killed).

To see the basis for the second hypothesis, let’s set aside the issue of killing: Suppose that the transporter doesn’t destroy your body. It just scans it and makes a copy of you, so now there are two of you. In this case, the transporter is functioning as a kind of high-tech cloning device, one capable of making an identical copy that doesn’t even have to grow up and acquire new memories. It’s a totally identical clone in the best tradition of bad sci-fi cloning stories.

But this would put the theological issue on the same footing as cloning, which theologians have already had the chance to chew over in real life.

As I’ve often pointed out before, if you were able to clone a person (either by fissioning an early embryo or by nuclear transfer) and you got a rational being as a result then it would be unambiguous that the clone has a rational soul.

Why is that?

Well, all you’ve done in this case is come up with a new human body by a morally illicit means. God means human bodies to come into existence as the result of sexual union between a husband and a wife, and at the moment the body comes into existence, he provides it with a soul. That’s how he set things up to work for our species, and that’s the only way that it is moral for us to bring new humans into the world.

But God has already shown himself willing to provide souls even when human bodies are not generated in a morally licit manner. Humans have had the ability to create new human bodies in immoral ways for a long time (e.g., by premarital sex, by adultery, by rape). Recently we’ve added some new techniques (e.g., in vitro fertilization). And we may soon add more (e.g., cloning). But it’s all the same thing: You’re just coming up with a new human body by immoral means.

God has been willing to endow people who were born in such ways with rational souls as is evidenced by the fact that they are both living and rational. Jesus even had some people like that in his family tree (think: the Tamar incident in Genesis 38).

So if–in addition to artificial twinning and nuclear transfer–you come up with a new cloning technology (transporter cloning) then you haven’t changed the playing field theologically. All you’re doing is coming up with a new human body (a rather mature one) by immoral means, but that won’t stop God from endowing it with a rational soul.

So it doesn’t seem to me that having a transporter produce rational copies of you would be evidence for the non-existence of the human soul.

It would be evidence for the existence of the soul if the transporter couldn’t produce rational copies that were known to be particle-for-particle identical to you. In that case we would have found an instance where God doesn’t provide a soul even though we’re providing a body. But the reverse isn’t the case.

I would thus say that the existence of the soul is to some extent verifiable but not falsifiable by transporter technology.

That doesn’t mean I’d be theologically comfortable with transporter technology. If it works as advertised then it’s basically a murder/cloning device.

Fortunately, in at least one episode, they indicate that you remain conscious through the transporter process, and if that’s the case then it doesn’t look like you’re being killed at all but simply adjusted in some way that allows you to pass through solid matter without actually being killed.

I’VE WRITTEN ABOUT THAT BEFORE.

So I differed with Krauss’s reasoning on this point, but it was still nice to listen to him tackle the obvious theological question that transporter technology would pose, and it was a pleasure to listen to his balanced and informed take on the physics of the show.

If you’d be interested in hearing an actual physicist offer a sympathetic but critical look at the subject then be sure to

GET THE BOOK.

Perhaps you have heard the old adage that you should never judge a book by its cover. Nonsense! … At least when we’re speaking literally, anyway.

The apologists here at Catholic Answers often get calls from inquirers asking whether we have read such-and-so book and, if so, what do we think about it. Unless the book happens to generate a lot of inquiries — on the order of, say, The DaVinci Code — the answers are often “No” and “We don’t have an opinion on it.”

Don’t despair. There are ways to glean a lot of information about a book without having to read the thing. Here are some tips:

Title: What does the title say about the author’s approach to the subject? If you were wandering through the parenting section of your local bookstore, a quick scan of the titles can give you insight into the approaches taken to parenting. The Strong-Willed Child may suggest a more combative approach to childrearing than Raising Your Spirited Child. If you have a gentler parenting philosophy, you’re more likely to be drawn to Unconditional Parenting than to Laying Down the Law.

Author: What else has this person written? What are his credentials in the field? These answers to these questions and many more can be found by plugging the author’s name into Google. These days, when many authors maintain personal web sites as marketing tools, you’re likely to find out a great deal about an author from the Internet.

Cover blurbs: Who is endorsing this book? Have you heard of them before? Do you know their reputation? If we move back to the parenting section example, if names like James Dobson or Dr. William Sears appear on the dustjacket, you’ve found an important clue about the author’s parenting philosophy. In the Catholicism section of the store, an endorsement of a book by Fr. Richard McBrien will suggest one thing, while an endorsement by George Weigel will suggest something else.

Publisher: What other titles has this company published? What is the company’s target audience? What does its web site reveal about the company? If the book is on Catholicism, is the publisher a Catholic company? If so, is the Catholic publisher orthodox, heterodox, or is it a mixed bag? Is the company secular? If so, what other religious titles has the company produced?

Copyright: If the copyright date is old, will there be current information missing? A book on nutrition from decades ago might still talk about the four food groups rather than the newer food pyramid. A Catholic book written before 1983 might reflect the 1917 Code of Canon Law and thus be out of date in some matters of ecclesiastical law.

Notes: If the book is non-fiction, does the author cite sources? Does he cite sources in a uniform manner, or is his citation haphazard? Are the bulk of the sources primary (e.g., studies, academic papers) or does he rely on general information books in his field in which the authors agree with his thesis? (You’d be surprised at how sloppy some researchers can be.)

Bibliography: What titles did the author use for research? Does the author recommend certain titles? If so, do you know anything about these titles or authors?

Acknowledgements: Who does the author thank? Thanks to experts in the field is helpful and the names can be plugged into Internet search engines for information about credentials and philosophy.

Foreword and Afterword: Who wrote introductory and/or summary matter? What is that person’s experience in the field? A book on the liturgy with an introduction by the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger would suggest that the book would be orthodox, while an introduction by Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB, would suggest something quite different.

After your gleaning, take stock. Are there red flags flying? If so, the book may not be worth your time. If you do have time to spare and your curiosity continues to be piqued, you may still want to read the book but you’ll know to rev up your Purity Filter before reading. In any case, you’ll have a pretty good gauge of the book before diving in. So, yes, you can judge a book by its cover!

If you have a spare 3.5 million lying around (pounds, that is; in U.S. dollars you’ll need $6.1 million), you may want to consider investing it in an original Shakespeare First Folio that will be auctioned off by Sotheby’s in July:

"Hailed by auctioneer Sotheby’s as the most important book in English literature, the First Folio is credited with saving for posterity many of the bard’s plays including ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Twelfth Night’ and ‘Julius Caesar’ which had never before been printed.

"’The First Folio preserves 18 of his plays, including some of the most major, which otherwise would have been lost for all time,’ English literature specialist Peter Selley said as the volume was put on show on Thursday.

"’Relatively complete copies of the Folio in contemporary or near contemporary bindings very rarely come to market. There is only one copy recorded as remaining in private hands,’ he added."

GET THE STORY.

Who do you turn to when U.S. military intelligence and Special Forces cannot ferret out Osama bin Laden? No, not Ghosbusters. You put out a page for Batman.

Of course.

"Bored with pitting his wits against the Joker and the Riddler, Batman is setting his sights on a more challenging target — Osama bin Laden.

"Holy Terror, Batman! an upcoming graphic novel from famed Batman writer Frank Miller, sees the caped crusader facing off against Al-Qaeda operatives who attack Gotham City.

"Miller, who has already inked his way through 120 pages of the 200-page opus, told a recent comic book convention that the novel was an unashamed "piece of propaganda" in which Batman ‘kicks Al-Qaeda’s ass’ [crudity in the original]."

GET THE STORY.

The Daily Planet has confirmed that Hollywood moguls are seeking to acquire the rights to Holy Terror, Batman! Christian Bale is expected to reprise his role as the Dark Knight from Batman Begins but there is no word yet on which actors are being considered for the role of archvillain Bin Laden.

While skimming Amy Welborn‘s Holy Blogs of Obligation (her blogroll), I surfed into an interesting blog on Catholic book publishing, a personal blog titled People of the Book by Jim Manney who is an editor for Loyola Press. If you’re involved in Catholic publishing or just like Catholic books, be sure to check it out.

To coincide with the first anniversary of her death this coming March, the Schindler family will be releasing a book on their struggle to save her life:

"Terri Schiavo’s parents and siblings are writing a book about their struggle in the epic end-of-life case that divided the country and captured the attention of everyone from the Pope John Paul II to President Bush, their publisher said Tuesday.

"The yet untitled memoir by parents Bob and Mary Schindler, brother Bobby Schindler and sister Suzanne Vitadamo will be published in March to coincide with the first anniversary of the death of the brain-damaged woman, whose feeding tube was removed after her husband won a court order to do so.

"’This book is the moving story of an ordinary family caught up in extraordinary circumstances, and it will set the record straight for the first time,’ said Jamie Raab, senior vice president and publisher at Warner Books in New York."

Apparently unwilling to miss out on the action, Terri’s husband and murderer Michael Schiavo also plans to release his own memoir, to be titled Terri: The Truth, in which it is likely that he will tell everything but that:

"The Schindlers’ book is likely to compete for space on the shelves with a memoir by Terri Schiavo’s husband, Michael, who fought his in-laws in court for eight years to end her life, arguing she would not have wanted to be kept alive in what doctors called a persistent vegetative state.

"Michael Schiavo said he is collaborating on the book with author Michael Hirsh. The 280-page book is titled Terri: [T]he Truth, and is planned for release in March by Dutton Publishing."

GET THE STORY.

The Schindlers will not profit from their book on Terri, instead planning to "donate profits from the book to a foundation they established when they were fighting to save Terri’s life, Warner Books said. The foundation now is dedicated to protecting severely disabled people."

No word yet on Michael Schiavo’s plans for the money he will make from his book.

You may have heard the speculation that William Shakespeare was a Catholic. Author Clare Asquith, in her new book Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, claims that the Bard of Stratford seeded his plays with subversive Catholic references that was a code for the Elizabethan and Jacobean Catholic resistance movement:

"Far from being an ambitious entertainer who played down his Catholic roots under a repressive Elizabethan regime, Shakespeare took deliberate risks each time he took up his quill, according to Clare Asquith’s new book Shadowplay. She argues that the plays and poems are a network of crossword puzzle-like clues to his strong Catholic beliefs and his fears for England’s future. Aside from being the first to spot this daring Shakespearean code, Asquith also claims to be the first to have cracked it.

"’It has not been picked up on before because people have not had the complete context,’ she explained this weekend. ‘I am braced for flak, but we now know we have had the history from that period wrong for a long time because we have seen it through the eyes of the Protestant, Whig ascendancy who, after all, have written the history.’

"It is now widely accepted that the era was not a period of political consensus, says Asquith. Instead, it was a time in which opposition voices were banished and censorship meant the burning of illegal pamphlets and printed works.

"As a result the Catholic resistance, which had been going for 70 years by the time Shakespeare was writing, had already developed its own secret code words; a subversive communication system which the playwright developed further in his work."

GET THE STORY.

GET THE BOOK.

This story caught my eye since I am currently reading through The Winter’s Tale with a reading group, in preparation for seeing the play performed. I’ve always been fascinated by Shakespeare, but found him difficult to penetrate and so have neglected actually studying him. Whether or not Asquith’s claim has merit, it certainly does pique my desire to better understand Shakespeare.

A reader writes:

I’ve been studying Catholic teaching and am considering becoming a Roman Catholic.  My question is: what resources ought one actually read the early fathers in?  The snippets on Catholic.com  are helpful but I am seeking a broad base understanding.

There are several different resources that I could recommend. It depends on what you are looking for.

The main problem is that the writings of the Chruch Fathers are so voluminous that one person could spend years reading them. If you’re actually up for that, the most easily available set is a 38-volume set produced in the 19th century that, since it is public domain, is now online at a number of locations, such as www.newadvent.org.

Even this set, though, is not complete. There are other works of the Fathers not found in it. (And, as one Baptist pastor who later became Catholic noted to me, it sometimes excludes some of the more Catholic-leaning works since the editors were Protestant.)

If you’re looking for a broad summary but not the texts themselves then there is a 4-volume set called Patrology by Johannes Quaesten.

What I’d really recommend if you’re looking for a summary, though, is the 1-volume setbook Ealy Christian Doctrines by J.N.D. Kelly. Kelly is a Protestant, but he’s very good about admitting how Catholic the early Fathers were.

If you’re looking for texts (shorter than the 38-volume set) rather than summaries then I’d have to main recommendations.

The first is a 3-volume set called Faith of the Early Fathers by William Jurgens. It is like the excerpts on Catholic.Com except that it isn’t organized by topic. Instead, it proceeds in historical order from Father to Father, giving passages that the different Fathers said on particular subjects. The passages also (often) are longer than the ones on Catholic.Com and will give you a broader selection of what the Fathers were saying on different topics, as well as more of the context.

If you want whole documents but aren’t up for a long set, I’d recommend Early Christian Writings, edited by Maxwell Staniforth. This is a 1-volume edition of writings from the first and second centuries. It was very helpful to me when I was becoming Catholic, though it suffers from two problems: (1) It only covers a very small handful of documents compared to those that are out there (which is why it can offer whole documents while remaining 1 volume long) and (2) the period it covers is so early that the Church hadn’t yet had a chance to thoroughly reflect on what had been given to it by Christ and the apostles and so there are a lot of imprecise and, at times, even bizzare things. You won’t get as many of the crisply formulated expressions of theology that you will from later ages. Still, it’s quite valuable and contains things like Clement’s and Ignatius’s letters, as well as the Didache.

Following up with any of these recommendations will give you clues about what you may want to investigate next. For example, if you do some reading in Quaesten or Jurgens or Kelly then you’ll learn about documents that you may want to look up and read in more detail in the 38-volume set.

Hope this helps, and God bless!

Have you ever been through reading cycles? Bibliophile though I am, it seems my reading life is one cycle after another. Right now I’m on my non-fiction cycle and reading fiction can be a chore.

I grew up in a Reader’s Haven, although some might have called it a Reader’s Hovel out of exasperation at trying to climb over the stacks of books. My father introduced all of his children to reading and liked to brag of when he was a child and was the only kid in the neighborhood allowed to borrow double the allotment of books allowed by his local library because the librarians knew he’d have them all finished within the two-week loan period.

Similarly, I was also a voracious reader as a kid. When I was in sixth grade I broke the five thousand page record for pages read in a grading period simply because the teacher said it had never been done. (In retrospect, I think he simply said that to encourage kids like me to try to break that limit.) Give me a four-hundred-page book and I could have it finished in two days.

I can still wolf down books, but only if the ones I’m reading fit the cycle through which I’m currently passing. For example, for years I was a romance novel fan. Still love romance novels — they’re a sentimental favorite — but it is now a chore rather than a pleasure to plow through them. When I read fiction these days, I usually do best with the cozy mysteries — especially the foodie mysteries that have recipes printed in the book. I may never try out those recipes, but I love reading through them and imagining how the food would turn out. (Likely better for my waistline anyway!)

But give me a non-fiction book on a subject that interests me — currently, Pope Benedict XVI, marriage, and parenting issues, and please don’t analyze that too deeply! — and once again I have to carefully pace my reading so I’ll have enough book left to read to get me to the next payday. Does anyone else have experience with reading cycles? If so, through what cycles of the Reader’s Haven have you passed?